Games servers play: A procedural approach

Abstract

Game theory has recently been recognized as a powerful tool to model interactions among artificial agents. Game theorists, however, have never tried to explicitly model how players reason to a solution. This becomes a crucial flaw whenever one attempts to apply game theoretic solutions to multi-agents systems. In this paper we provide an effective procedure that allows artificial agents to coordinate using game-theoretic tools. We model agents' encounters as extensive-form games, and show how agents can compute a set of “reasonable paths” through the tree. The set of reasonable paths corresponds to the set of strategies that survive iterated elimination of (weakly) dominated strategies in the normal form. Whenever our procedure identifies a unique path, that path corresponds to a Nash equilibrium. Moreover, our procedure rules out all Nash equilibria that contain (weakly) dominated strategies. Further, we show how our notion of “reasonable” paths leads to the backwards induction solution in the case of games of perfect information, and to forward induction in the case of games of imperfect information.